If you’re in Maine, vote NO on 1. This is the law that attempts to repeal civil rights from gay couples.
If you’re in Washington state, vote YES on 71. This is a vote to preserve a law that gives legal protection to gay couples.
Isn’t it amazing that we even have to argue for equality, and that there are people who oppose it?
I am so disappointed. The little evangelical goober has a new book that promises to provide evidence of life after death — it’s right in the title, Life After Death: The Evidence — but he doesn’t seem to have, you know, actually provided any evidence. Newsweek has a summary of his arguments.
The “evidence,” of necessity, is indirect: D’Souza doesn’t claim to have communicated with anyone who has died, and he doesn’t expect to. Instead, he looks to the human heart, and finds therein a universal moral code underlying acts of self-sacrifice and charity that appear to run counter to the Darwinian imperative to outcompete thy neighbor. This is a time-honored argument for the existence of a God who created human beings in his image and imbued them with a moral sense, as well as the free will to follow, or ignore, it. Berlinski uses the argument in his book, and Collins credits it with turning him from atheism to evangelical Christianity. (D’Souza acknowledges that the prominent atheist Richard Dawkins has offered an evolutionary explanation for human goodness, but he doesn’t buy it.) In a Jesuitical display that does credit to his reputation as “an Indian William F. Buckley Jr.,” D’Souza turns to his advantage one of the atheists’ favorite arguments, God’s apparent tolerance for human suffering. Precisely because evil so often goes unpunished in this world, he asserts, the moral code must reflect another reality, in which souls are judged, punished, or rewarded after death. “The postulate of an afterlife enables us to make sense of this life,” he writes. It worked for Dante, didn’t it?
The universal moral code argument is so tired. No, we don’t need a magic man in the sky to implant puppet strings in our brains to make us do good, and as the reviewer mentions, we have perfectly reasonable natural explanations that fit the phenomenon just fine. But even beyond that, an external-sourced moral code wouldn’t say anything about an afterlife. If I built a robot and included in its circuitry some code that inclined it to avoid colliding with cats, that does not imply that it is therefore eternal and will outlast any later encounters with a sledgehammer and a scrapheap.
The remainder of his argument is built on air. “If there is a god, and if there is an afterlife, and if there is judgment of earthly acts after death, then there is an afterlife” is an abomination of circularity and unsupported presuppositions.
But wait! There’s more! And it gets worse!
And if that’s not enough to convince you, D’Souza provides a checklist of benefits from believing in life after death: it keeps us honest, gives our lives “a sense of hope and purpose”–and “surveys show” that believers have better sex. It provides “a mechanism to teach our children right from wrong”–a mechanism that those who have been subjected to it tend to describe as a neurotic lifelong fear of going to Hell. And if your smart-alecky kid, full of all that Galileo stuff they get in school nowadays, should ask just where this Judgment business takes place, D’Souza provides you with a response. It happens in the multiverse, the infinitely multiplying complex of worlds predicted by some versions of quantum theory. In the multiverse, physical laws can take on different values, and matter itself may have a different form, so “there is nothing in physics to contradict the idea that we can live beyond death in other realms with bodies that are unlike the bodies we now possess.”
The argument from consequences is a non-starter, too. For instance, I have my doubts about the results of surveys about sex in populations where sexual behavior is both obligatory and a source of much angst about its effects on chances for a happy afterlife, but even if we were to think that the claim that believers have better sex, it doesn’t imply in any way that there is a god or an afterlife. Dinish D’Souza might have more satisfying orgasms if he fantasizes about having sex with Ann Coulter while he masturbates, but that does not mean that he is therefore having sex with Ann Coulter. It wouldn’t matter how highly he rated his onanistic experiences, it doesn’t provide any evidence of actual intercourse with a real live human (or in the case of Coulter, simulacrum thereof) female. Similarly, if his fantasies are all about a muscular bearded Jesus in a loin cloth sweeping him into his arms and teaching him the true meaning of ecstasy, that might make him feel good, but it is not evidence that Jesus loves him. Not even in a manly way.
And seriously…he’s going to trot out quantum physics as evidence for an afterlife? Man, join the crowd of crazies who have turned “quantum” into the “abracadabra” of the 21st century.
I don’t think I need to read his book if that is the quality of his reasoning. But if any of you stumble across it and find a compelling scrap of evidence that the reviewer neglected to pass along, let us know. If the above examples are any indication, they’ll be hilarious.
Here’s a nice video about pachycephalosaurs describing a little exercise in taxonomic consolidation.
People keep writing to me to complain that the goddamn stupid comment registration system doesn’t work, so they can’t comment. Yes, you can. Just ignore registration and fill in the blanks with name and email (which isn’t shown), and you can comment.
This is especially irritating since I turned off the comment registration system some time back, and have been dealing with all the spam that’s been pouring in for the last two weeks just so people would be able to freely comment. I’m still plowing through all the comments that accumulated over my long weekend away, too…and was thinking I should have turned it back on while I was gone.
Since Jerry Coyne will never ever let me forget my modeling session with Ruse, I’ll counter it a little with a photo of the sensible people from the University of Northern Iowa.
I’ll be speaking at UNI on 10 February, too.
When I gave my talk at Minot, ND a few weeks ago, one of the things the Northwest Art Center (which hosted the talk) did was to have the audience evaluate me. This could be useful, I thought, but they actually mailed me copies of the forms, and…umm, no, they weren’t. As I rather expected, the evaluations are highly bimodal, with a majority giving me an enthusiastic thumbs up, and a substantial minority giving me a thumbs down. The negative reviews might have had some potential for helping me out, except, well, take a look at one example.
I’ve got a surprisingly consistent subset of reviews in which the listener seems to have spent most of their time doodling praise for Jebus on their forms.
That last one was an entirely positive review of the lecture, but still…I see signs that some people walked in with their brains firmly switched to the “off” position.
Jerry Coyne missed one: he lists a few annoying columnists in the Guardian, Andrew Brown and Madeleine Bunting, but I guess he didn’t notice that Michael Ruse just posted a whine about Dawkins and other atheists. Well, a few of us: he mentions Dawkins, Dennett, Coyne, and me as the people who bring atheism into disrepute. We’re in a schism, don’t you know; I just wish he’d used the term “Deep Rifts”, since that seems to be the fashionable phrase for everyone who wants to find consolation in the imminent demise of the New Atheist movement (to which we have to reply that we’re very fond of our rifts, and consider our willingness to plunge into battle with even our fellow unbelievers to be part of our plucky, feisty charm).
Now here’s the problem with Ruse. He believes that people who are atheists but are not Michael Ruse are all lacking in rigor and a charitable appreciation of the profundity of theological belief. At the same time, he believes that all those religious people whose beliefs he does not share must have built those ideas on a robust intellectual foundation, and that because they are nice people who invite him to give talks, maybe there could be something to that god-chattering stuff. And you should pat him on the back and congratulate him on his wisdom for seeing worth in even the most absurd proponent of creationism. For example:
I don’t have faith. I really don’t. Rowan Williams does as do many of my fellow philosophers like Alvin Plantinga (a Protestant) and Ernan McMullin (a Catholic). I think they are wrong; they think I am wrong. But they are not stupid or bad or whatever. If I needed advice about everyday matters, I would turn without hesitation to these men. We are caught in opposing Kuhnian paradigms. I can explain their faith claims in terms of psychology; they can explain my lack of faith claims also probably partly through psychology and probably theology also. (Plantinga, a Calvinist, would refer to original sin.) I just keep hearing Cromwell to the Scots. “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.” I don’t think I am wrong, but the worth and integrity of so many believers makes me modest in my unbelief.
Modest in his unbelief, perhaps, but at the same time remarkably immodest in his self-congratulatory appreciation of his own uncritical, unquestioning acceptance of his fellow human beings’ twisty theological rationales. Of course any and all of us could be mistaken, and certainly are on many matters — but that does not mean that all of our critical faculties must be discarded, that we look wise when we listen to both the bible-thumping bumpkin claiming that god made the earth by magic 6000 years ago, and the geologist rattling off a long list of detailed, technical explanations of the evidence for a 4½ billion year old earth that got to its current state by the long accrual of natural events…and we say to both, “think it possible you may be mistaken”. He looks like a clueless gobshite, instead. Ruse’s game is to suspend judgment when looking at the most appalling foolishness, a body of superstitions which he does not personally find believable, and to dial up the judgmental denial to 11 when he’s looking at atheists who are not Michael Ruse.
Now fortunately, Jerry Coyne also found another good columnist in the Guardian, Marina Hyde, who instead of the phony and peculiarly biased objectivity Ruse demands, actually suggests that looking at all religious claims critically is enlightening. She’s discussing the recent bad PR that scientology has received, and suggests that when you step back and look at other religions, Jehovah isn’t any more sensible than Xenu.
But when I think of Mel Gibson building his $42m church compound in Malibu, blithely telling interviewers at the time of the Passion of the Christ’s release that his then wife would unfortunately be going to hell, because she was Church of England … well, I can’t find it in myself to find him any less barking than Tom Cruise.
Clearly, Scientologists should be forced to justify their doctrinal lunacies – the only sadness is that other religions are apparently exempt from having to do the same. Imagine for a moment a Bashir-type interviewing some senior cardinal. “So,” he might inquire, “you’re saying that by some magic the communion wafer actually becomes the flesh of a man who died 2,000 years ago, a man who – and I don’t want to put words into your mouth here – we might categorise as an imaginary friend who can hear the things you’re thinking in your head? And when you’ve done that, do you mind going over the birth control stuff?”
What a shame that we see rather fewer of these exchanges, however amusing and useful a sideshow Scientology may be.
I am sure, if I stop for a moment and put myself in a Rusian frame of mind, that Tom Cruise is wealthier and better-looking than me, and has achieved a remarkable level of success that suggests that we shouldn’t dismiss his abilities as entirely without worth. I am also sure that McMullin, Plantinga, and Williams have also navigated the shoals of life successfully and acquired personal and professional reputations of which they can be proud. That does not in any way imply, however, that I should regard all of their views as having earned some measure of respect; rather, we should learn from these fellows that some measure of lunacy and belief in groundless, overwrought nonsense is not a barrier to worldly success, and even that a whole-hearted frolic in a superstition shared by an influential community can be a personal benefit.
Could I be wrong in my belief that there is no god? Sure. Cromwell’s cry applies to me and to you and to everyone. But you will not sway me by telling me that the proponents of god belief are not bad men, which was not an issue in question anyway; you will not find me appreciative of an approach that says the first step is to learn to be uncritical of ideas and suspend judgment simply because the other guy is caught in a different “paradigm”. An understanding that we may be mistaken does not mean that everyone is equally mistaken. Some beliefs, such as in Xenu and his fleet of space-faring DC10s, or Jesus performing cheap tricks in Galilee and giving us a ticket to heaven by being tortured to death, are simply patently absurd and demand far more rigor in their defense than lame testimonials to the good character of some theologians.
If you’d like to see two metazoans at once, there’s another photo of Carl Buell and crow in this series.
You’ve probably all heard by now that Ray Comfort is coming out with his own butchered version of Darwin’s Origin, with big chunks cut out of it, and a deeply stupid introduction slapped on. It’s within his rights to do that, since the book is in the public domain now (as is, say, the KJV Bible), but it’s also a metaphor for the sleaziness of creationism. They have no original ideas, so all they can do is steal the work of real scientists; their ideas are contradicted by the evidence, so their only strategy is to delete the parts that make them uncomfortable, and put a false spin on what’s left. Ray Comfort also has a lot of gall; he doesn’t understand the concepts Darwin discussed, so he’s got no foundation on which to base his editorial decisions. What next? Will he decide to put out a special creationist edition of Relativity: The Special and General Theory with the math chopped out and his own clueless introduction that calls it all bunk?
Anyway, Ray Comfort tries to defend his act of intellectual vandalism online in a written debate with Eugenie Scott, who shreds him. This is going to be interesting, since what’s up so far is only part 1; next week, they’re going to reply to each other’s initial argument.
I’m feeling a bit jealous. A teacher was suspended for assigning a reading from one of those subversive, radical bloggers, and it wasn’t me! It was Jonah Lehrer!
The article was about the prevalence of homosexuality among animals. Apparently the thought that homosexuality might occur naturally, rather than being a purely human sin, does not sit well with certain people. I thought the most objectionable part of the article was Roughgarden’s blithe panadaptationism (“Given the pervasive presence of homosexuality throughout the animal kingdom, same-sex partnering must be an adaptive trait that’s been carefully preserved by natural selection.” Bleh.)
Congratulations to Jonah, however, for being offensive without even trying. Impressive.
